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‘One-offs and homebuilts’: 497 Posts

Sometimes it takes more than a bag of sand and snow tires to get around in the wintertime. Sometimes you need a little more ingenuity and a cache of old auto and airplane parts, which North Dakotan Roy Berg had plenty of in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and which he used to create a series of homebuilt snow planes.

After a recent comment from reader Rudy Radke mentioning Berg’s snow planes, we followed up, looking for more photos and info. He put us in touch with his cousin and Berg’s son, Gerry Berg, who filled us in on the contraptions. Gerry said the snow planes were built mostly for fox and rabbit hunting. “As I remember, the county paid a two dollar bounty for fox,” he wrote. “Starting the engine was a two-man job. One person would sit in the driver’s seat and the other person would turn over the engine by hand. The person at the engine would turn the engine over several times without spark. He would then call out “Contact.” The person in the driver’s seat would flip two toggle switches one for each magneto. The person at the engine would crank the prop as hard as he could and get out of the way.”

Regarding the first snow plane, pictured above, Gerry said that it was built in 1947. “My brother was born in 1946, and he looks to be about two years old in the picture. It had a single seat and short wings. I’m not sure why it had wings. Maybe for some lift but it needed the skis on the ground for stability.”

“The second snow plane was built in 1949 or ’50, based on my brothers age. As Rudy suggested, it looks like it used a bomber fuselage. It had long wooden skis without suspension.”

“The third snow plane was built around 1952. The fuselage was from a plane, and it looks like the front hood off of some car. As you can see, it used automotive axles with wooden skis set on long sheets of steel.”

The fourth plane I think was built in the mid to late Fifties. In 1955 my folks built a new house, so I don’t think they would have had time to work on snow planes. I can remember this one being built and can still smell the dope being put on the fabric to shrink it tight. I was born in late 1950. You can tell from the picture that this was a well engineered snow plane. Very streamline with four-point suspension. The plane would go 50 to 60 MPH with good conditions. The front skis pivoted on kingpins at the ends of the front axle. The front hood opened to store the foxes and rabbits. This plane had a four-cylinder horizontally opposed Continental engine. I think about 60 HP. The fuselage and engine came from a Piper Cub airplane purchased at the Fergus Falls airport. This snow plane was converted into a three-wheeled crop sprayer in the mid-1960s. I don’t have any pictures of the sprayer. The last time it was used as a snow plane was in the late 1960s. The engine was overhauled, but the pistons were too tight and it overheated, if I remember correctly. It was never run after that.

Gerry said all that remains of the four is the frame of the last one, which his brother now owns after it sat outside for years. They do, however, still have a few of Roy’s other contraptions, including an Allis tractor turned skidloader, a four-wheel drive tractor that he built for $500, a homebuilt garden tractor, and another skid-steer loader that he built in 1962 for $200 .

The rules of hot rodding have long been this: there are no rules. Perhaps no single car in hot rod history has embraced that belief better than the Barbeque Stove Bolt Special, a 1951 custom built with parts from 16 cars, two motorcycles and an airplane. Next week, this monument to ingenuity will cross the block in Phoenix as part of RM’s Arizona sale.

While it’s not uncommon to see Deuce Coupes sporting small-block Chevy engines, the Barbeque Stove Bolt Special goes much, much farther than this. In fact, it’s hard to identify the car by a single brand, or even by two brands. The frame started life under a 1927 Chevrolet, while much of the body (excluding the hand-built pickup bed) came from a 1921 Dodge touring car, except for the grille, which was pulled from a 1932 Ford. Power comes from a 1928 Chevrolet four-cylinder block, stuffed full of a 1932 Ford crankshaft, 1936 Pontiac connecting rods, a set of Jahns pistons and capped by a Harry Miller-modified 1930 Oldsmobile three-port head fitted with Buda diesel valves and Nash rocker arms. Carburetors are SUs, liberated from an unspecified Jaguar (or SS) model, while the dry-sump oiling system was engineered by the builders.

The builders, in this case, were James H. Hill and his father, Clark Hill, originally of Vallejo, California. Knowing that such radical modifications would tax the strength of the block, the Hills built up the block using 26 pounds of welding rod and six tanks of acetylene gas; to ensure even and complete cooling (and thus reduce the chances of warping), the hot, welded block was cured for four days in a charcoal bed in the family’s barbeque, and the custom’s name was born.

Following the car’s completion in 1951, it was campaigned on dry lakes in land speed record competition. The California-Nevada Timing Association clocked the Frankenrod at a speed of 84.4 MPH, which the Hills later assured Honk magazine (the predecessor to Car Craft) was due to its unfavorable 2.54:1 gearing. There’s no record of a higher top speed with reduced gearing, but the one-of-a-kind custom also proved its worth at the 1952 National Roadster Show at Oakland, where it captured a first prize for originality.

In 1955, the Hill family moved from California to Oregon, and the Barbeque Stove Bolt Special remained in their care until acquired by its current owner in 2014. It’s being offered with trophies from the California-Nevada Timing Association Speed Run and the Oakland Roadster Show, along with negatives documenting its dry lakes history. There are boxes of spare and NOS parts, too, including piston rings, a Jahns piston and an Olds three-port head. On the cosmetic side, there are two cans of still-liquid paint (complete with a 1950 date) along with the original top and side curtains.

The car’s current owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, came across the unique rod at the Portland Spring Automotive Swap Meet, where it was displayed for the first time since being put away in 1967. A deal was struck, and the car left the ownership of the Hill family for the first time since its construction. As its new owner explained to us, “The engineering and fabrication is absolutely remarkable; no one builds cars like this today. The Barbeque Stove Bolt Special is a very significant hot rod, with documented history and truly unique construction and engineering, at a time when nearly all others were simply flathead Ford-based.”

The owner admits that he hasn’t tried to start the car, although the engine turns over and the Barbeque Stove Bolt Special appears to have ample compression. The breakup of a relationship left him without a place to turn wrenches, along with financial burdens that necessitate its sale, a story that many collectors can relate to. Given the car’s documented history and creative engineering, RM is predicting a selling price between $80,000 and $100,000 when the car crosses the stage on Friday, January 16.

For additional information on the 2015 Phoenix sale, visit RMAuctions.com.

UPDATE (18.January): The Barbeque Stove Bolt Special sold for a price of $49,500.

* As part of its celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Street Hemi last year, Allpar made sure to speak to as many people involved with the Hemi’s development as possible, including Engine design leader Willem Weertman, street engine tuning chief Pete Hagenbuch, Roger Meiners, Mike Buckel, Ed Poplawski, and Tom Hoover. Some interesting interviews in there for Mopar fans.

* “Cleveland’s most rakish sports car” isn’t exactly the highest honor in the world (why not “Ohio’s most rakish sports car?” Was there a more rakish one in Wapakoneta?), but it was one that Johnny Campbell and Elbert Dooley aspired to with their 1952 Cado homebuilt Olds-powered sports car. Geoff Hacker at SportCustom.com has more.

* It might look like a funny sort of Honda CVCC, but as Torchinsky detailed this week, the EA266 prototype was actually a Porsche-designed mid-engined potential VW Beetle replacement that came pretty close to reality until all prototypes and records of its existence were vigorously destroyed by Volkswagen.

* Finally, one more bit of auto-related architecture news this week. Missouri recently decided to close the Gasconade River Bridge – a big deal to Route 66 enthusiasts dedicated to preserving the Mother Road and who note that the closing of the bridge would interrupt what’s left of the route.

Zero point two-zero, or better than the Tatra T77 and almost as good as the GM EV1. That’s the coefficient of drag rating for the 1960 Pininfarina X, one of the most aerodynamic cars built and one of the oddest, thanks to its diamond-shaped wheel layout. It also makes it the most aerodynamically efficient vehicle to cross the block at next month’s Barrett-Jackson sale.

Other prototypes and even production cars used the unconventional diamond layout over the years. Sunbeam produced a hundred or so around the turn of the century, Wolseley and Voisin had each proposed such a vehicle before World War II, and a California tinkerer named H. Gordon Hansen designed and built his own Gordon Diamond by 1947, but all for different reasons. Hansen, for instance, designed his largely as a safety car and figured that the best way to fit a perimeter bumper to a car was to rearrange the positions of the wheels.

Alberto Morelli had an entirely different purpose in designing the Pininfarina X, as Karl Ludvigsen wrote in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car #53. A professor at Turin’s Polytechnic University, Morelli had a deep interest in aerodynamics as they applied both to aircraft and to automobiles. Coachbuilder Pininfarina (known as Pinin Farina up until 1960) approached Morelli and asked him to apply his research into something practical: an extremely efficient, low-drag family sedan.

The diamond layout that he chose allowed a narrow cross section at the front that widened toward the middle and tapered away toward the rear, an ideal aerodynamic shape, he argued. The front wheel would thus steer, the middles would serve as outriggers and the rear would drive the car. He chose a 43hp 1,089cc four-cylinder engine and four-speed transmission from a Fiat 1100 to power it (installed at an angle behind the right rear quarter panel and driving the rear wheel via a V-drive apparatus) and suspended it with synthetic rubber at each wheel. The fins at the rear, according to Ludvigsen and Morelli, had nothing to do with American automotive fashion; instead, they actually helped to counter the loss of stabilization that came as a result of the highly aerodynamic shape.

Pininfarina built Morelli’s concept, tested it extensively, and even drove it up to 90 MPH, about 20 percent faster than a stock Fiat 1100 was capable of. The company displayed it at the Turin Auto Show in November 1960 and at Brussels in 1961. Battista Farina reportedly shopped the X around to carmakers to see if they would built it, but found it a tough pitch. Perhaps that had something to do with Pininfarina asking Morelli to follow up the X with the Pininfarina Y, a two-door car with a similar aerodynamic shape but with a conventional rectangular wheel layout. That car, which was based on a Fiat 600 D and debuted at Turin in 1961, rated a coefficient of drag of 0.27 – better than pretty much any car on the road at the time, but not nearly as efficient as the Model X – seeming to prove that Morelli was onto something by selecting the diamond layout.

As for the X, it remained in Pininfarina’s possession until 2007, when Pininfarina’s museum sold the unrestored car. Three years later, collector car dealer Aero Toy Store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, began to offer the X for sale, first on Hemmings.com for $1.35 million and shortly after on the company’s own site for $3 million. The X now will cross the block with no reserve.

Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction will take place January 10-18. For more information, visit Barrett-Jackson.com.

UPDATE (17.January 2015): The Pininfarina X sold for a price of $330,000.

UPDATE (3.February 2015): We see that Hyman now has the Pininfarina X for sale at an undisclosed price.

Chevrolet offered its G-body Malibu Classic in four-door sedan and four-door wagon body styles, but a two-door sedan delivery version was not on the menu. If you’ve been looking for just such a vehicle, here’s good news: at least one 1983 Malibu Classic sedan delivery exists, and it’s for sale on Hemmings.com. Power comes from a standard-issue 350 V-8, bolted to a three-speed automatic, which means that repair parts, when needed, should be easy to source. Per the current owner’s notes, the one-of-a-kind Malibu will need brake work and a replacement rear window, presumably sourced from a G-body Malibu Wagon. On the plus side, it’s said to be rust free, and you’ll likely have no trouble finding it in a crowded parking lot. From the seller’s description:

In light of Wednesday’s announcement that the United States would be restoring full diplomatic relations with Cuba, including the opening of embassies in both Havana and Washington, D.C., we though it appropriate to run a gallery of automotive images captured by reader Graham Lloyd on a recent trip to Cuba.

As his photos demonstrate, the island’s automobiles are an eclectic mix of new (mostly from China) and old, masterfully re-engineered by owners to keep them going with materials at hand. As Graham points out, those expecting to find unmolested classics will be sorely disappointed, while those with an appreciation for the artistry of the curbside mechanic will surely be charmed.

No one yet knows what the outcome of normalized relations with Cuba will be, but its likely that the future will see the easing of travel restrictions and, possibly, trade embargoes. Until those of us in the United States can freely travel to and from Cuba, enjoy Graham’s photos and his narration.

The word “Cuba” is one of the few in the English language that will elicit a wide range of responses. For the politically inclined, it represents two brothers that have been a thorn in the side of the USA for over 50 years. A cigar smoker will go dreamy eyed over the holy grail of tobacco. For a tourist, the island offers resorts, beautiful beaches, architecture and friendly people. It’s a fisherman’s paradise. For car guys, it is like going back in time to when big American cars ruled the road.

I am very fortunate to be able to visit the island and see it in a manner most tourists don’t. My friend retired there a couple of years ago, and I have an invite to visit any time I want. I have always thought the best way to see a country is to avoid the tourist traps and get immersed in the local culture. So, when I flew into Santa Clara, all the tourists went one direction. I went the other.

The first thing that struck me about the cars in Cuba (other than the vast array) is the ingenuity of the Cubans to keep these things on the road. Those that are more or less original in their drivetrains and suspensions are the exception to the rule. Lada and Mercedes diesel engine swaps are common conversions. Things like stainless sleeving of brake calipers is the norm, not a specialty item. I don’t recall seeing anything with an automatic transmission. One genius had a 1960 Corvair with a Lada diesel running rear-wheel drive. I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, but talk about adaptation.

Hint: This isn’t really a Hyundai.

There were few rides in the old stuff, and mostly we traveled in a mid-80s Lada. The exceptions were a late 50′s Buick converted to a wagon/sedan delivery and a 57 Rambler. Both were converted to diesels, so I thought they would shake, shimmy and rattle down the road. Instead, both were solid and quiet, very well re-engineered.

The downside to these cars is the years of use and abuse they have seen. Very few look good close up. To be frank, there are better cars to restore in junkyards throughout the USA. Very few have panels not peppered with dings. Straight cars have pounds of bondo or filler smoothing the sides. Paint is whatever they can scrounge. And they have much higher dollar values there; even $8,000 won’t get you much.

A Chinese-built Emgrand sedan.

I hope you enjoy the photos. I will be escaping the Canadian winter for a couple of weeks in January, so hopefully, a part two of “car spotting Cuba” will follow in the near future.

Mark Smith’s custom 1936 Ford roadster. Do you know who built it in the early 1950s? Photos by Mark Smith.

Mark Smith was looking for a 1932 Ford phaeton when the channeled 1936 Ford roadster seen here found him. Fifteen months later, he remains on a quest to find out more information on the car’s history, including the craftsman behind the skilled bodywork.

Mark’s quest for an unrestored 1932 Ford phaeton in Southern Maine had him knocking on numerous doors before leading him to a farm house in Cape Neddick, Maine. While the owner had no interest in selling, or even showing, the phaeton in question, he did ask Mark if he’d be interested in seeing a “very cool” 1936 Ford custom roadster.

As a collector of early Fords, ranging from a 1907 Model K through postwar examples, Mark’s interest is primarily in unmodified automobiles. Perhaps it was the seller’s enthusiasm for the custom roadster, or the fact that it was an early-1950s build, but Mark agreed to at least have a look. In his words, the car was “spectacular,” despite its heavy patina. A deal was struck to buy the car, and three days later, it became part of Mark’s collection. That was in September of 2013.

The car’s former owner had given Mark a few clues to go on. Inside the back of the car was a New York license plate from 1955, and the car had been acquired from a seller in Kingston, New York, as part of a multi-vehicle bundle sale. While the seller confirmed that the car had come from the Hudson Valley and had been sitting in a barn since the 1960s, he knew little else about it. A subsequent call by Mark to Mike Wolfe, the earlier owner, revealed only that it had come out of an estate sale, and that the family knew little else about the car.

Mark’s next call was to his friend Ken Gross, a journalist and author (and a former feature editor of Hemmings Special Interest Autos), who once served as director of the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles. Ken’s knowledge of early build street rods and customs is extensive, and after seeing pictures of Mark’s find, he drove down to see the car in person. Mark says that Ken, too, was impressed with the quality of the workmanship on the Ford, but couldn’t provide any additional information on the builder.

To get the car in front of a diverse and knowledgeable audience, Mark made the decision to show the car at the fall AACA meet in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Doing so would be far easier if the car were operational, so Mark pulled the frozen flathead V-8 and replaced it with a known-good 1959 L-block from his collection. The brake system was serviced, a friend provided a usable windshield and frame, and Mark’s bit of sculpture was transformed into a functional automobile that shared Kirk White’s tent at Hershey.

There, Mark learned the car had come from Mellenville, New York, and thanks to a Model A Town Car that had once been part of the same collection, he now had the name of the previous owner – Donald Cassivant. Mark drove to New York to meet with Cassivant’s sons, but they, too knew nothing about the custom roadster. For as far back as they could remember, the channeled Ford had been part of their father’s extensive, eclectic and unorganized collection.

Once, at Hershey, a passerby told Kirk White that he did indeed know the builder of the car, but wandered off before Kirk could get further details from him. He never returned to the tent, and no other attendees at Hershey could offer up additional clues.

As Mark describes the car, “This 36 custom is extraordinary… whoever built it was an experienced builder, and this was unlikely to have been his first effort as a ‘custom channeled roadster’ builder. The lines were fabulous. The workmanship was excellent. The panel fit was perfect and nothing was overdone. The 49 Mercury dashboard was superbly fitted to the car. As aspects were well thought out and superbly executed.”

That should produce a relatively short list of prospects, even if one expands the search radius far beyond New York’s Hudson Valley. Somewhere, someone must have the information that Mark has been so enthusiastically seeking. Are you that person? If so, Mark is offering a reward for credible information about the car; you’ll find his contact details here.

UPDATE (11 December): Here are five more images just supplied by Mark.

When the wall at the back of the rented building came down, a few bricks fell inward. Nobody present—not even the owner of the building—knew what the wall concealed or even why the guy who had rented it put the wall up, they just knew that the wall had to come down. And when the dust cleared, they found that the bricks that toppled inward had landed on the plexiglass rear window of an odd little Mustang that raised a whole lot of questions that haven’t been conclusively answered even today, almost 50 years later, when the Mustang has been slated to go to auction.

What happened after the discovery of the shortened two-seater fiberglass-bodied Mustang in that warehouse in Inkster, Michigan, appears rather straightforward. The warehouse owner, who only tore down the wall after the guy who rented the space about six months prior—Vince Gardner, a veteran car designer who had worked for Cord and Auburn in the 1930s and Studebaker in the 1940s and 1950s—failed to pay all but the first month’s rent, either alerted the authorities or Ford directly. The Mustang, considered stolen after it disappeared from a Detroit-area warehouse in May of 1965, went to Aetna, the insurance company that had previously cut a $10,000-plus check to Dearborn Steel Tubing, the company that turned the car out a year or two prior.

Aetna, based in Hartford, Connecticut, then shipped the Mustang back to its headquarters, where it sat outside for a year or so until one of its executives bought it, titled it, put about 11,000 miles on its tri-power 302, and then placed an ad for it in the December 1968 issue of Hemmings Motor News.

He found a buyer in Bill Snyder, a Cleveland-area print shop owner who had seen the car both in the May 1965 issue of Motor Trend and in person when the Ford Custom Car Caravan made a stop at a Cleveland-area dealership; Snyder inquired about buying one then—”The Motor Trend article made it sound like Ford was going to start producing them,” he said—but was told that it was just an idea car not meant for production.

So Snyder jumped at the chance to buy the show car. He repaired the rear window and repainted the Mustang from its cracked candy apple lacquer to black primer, then drove it around Cleveland for another 4,000 miles before socking it away. He kept it in storage for the next few decades, until Bill Warner, chairman of the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, learned of the Mustang in 2011 and told Snyder that if he restored it, Warner would feature it in the concours. Snyder did, and Warner did.

But its pre-brick-wall history had some peculiarities, starting with the VIN: 5S08F100009, which indicates a 1965 Mustang convertible powered by the F-code, two-barrel, 260-cu.in. V-8—specifically, the ninth Mustang to come off of the assembly line at Ford’s pilot plant in Allen Park, Michigan, according to early Mustang historian Bob Fria. Fria said that alone makes the car significant, given that his research shows that only 15 pilot Mustangs were built in November or December 1963 (all notchbacks or convertibles), and just three of those 15—including Snyder’s—are known to exist.

Some of those 15 underwent destructive testing, while others went on to be evaluated by race teams and other departments within Ford Motor Company. According to Fria, Ford’s records show that three of the 15—the eighth, ninth and 10th—went to Andy Hotton at Dearborn Steel Tubing.

The eighth and 10th were reportedly scrapped, but the ninth went on to become something else. Snyder said he suspects that Ford had Dearborn Steel Tubing finish the Mustang with a scratch-built fiberglass fastback body and a custom-built tri-power 302-cu.in. V-8, specifically for the Ford Custom Car Caravan, with Vince Gardner’s help.

According to Snyder’s account of the car’s history, the Dearborn Steel Tubing-built fastback toured the country as the Mustang III, and once the Mustang finished its six-month tour on the caravan, Snyder said that Gardner learned that Ford planned to scrap the shortened Mustang and thus stole it to prevent its destruction, secreting it away in the Inkster warehouse.

“I think it was Dearborn Steel Tubing that filed the stolen car report,” Snyder said. “Though I still don’t know how it became (Dearborn Steel Tubing’s) property or why Ford would turn the title of it over to Dearborn Steel Tubing.” Ford later declined to prosecute Gardner, Snyder said, because Gardner was still doing pre-production engineering work for Ford.

However, auto historian Mark Gustavson, who has been researching the Ford Custom Car Caravan for an upcoming book, said Ford didn’t commission the shortened Mustang and that the company’s only direct involvement with the car came when Ford leased it from Gardner for the third edition of the Ford Custom Car Caravan.

“Gardner was an accomplished designer and needed no prompting from the Ford design studios,” Gustavson said. “There is no extant research that demonstrates that Gardner built the car to FoMoCo styling directives. It is not evidence that Ford owned the shorty Mustang because this car appeared in Ford Custom Car Caravan displays. Many independently-owned cars were leased by Ford for display in the Ford Caravan.”

Gustavson points to the DiDia 150, the so-called Bobby Darrin dream car; the Bill Cushenberry Silhouette; the Mustang Pegasus; and a number of vehicles built by George Barris, as examples of cars that independent customizers built and that Ford spotted and leased for the Custom Car Caravan.

He said he believes that Ford probably only became aware of the shortened Mustang once Gardner had already built it and entered it in a car show at Cobo Hall in Detroit. At the time, Gardner worked either directly for or as a freelancer for Hotton and would thus have had access to pre-production cars through Dearborn Steel Tubing. (Indeed, in his book Mustang Genesis, The Creation of the Pony Car, Fria notes that in 1963 Ford sent a Falcon chassis to Dearborn Steel Tubing for Gardner to convert into what would become the Mustang II show car.)

Whatever Gardner’s motivations for bricking the Mustang up in a warehouse and then not paying rent on the space, Gustavson didn’t say, but the answer perhaps lies in a profile on the designer that Michael Lamm wrote for the October 2007 issue of Collectible Automobile, in which he noted that Gardner battled mental health issues throughout his life.

A loner and a misfit, Gardner worked feverishly on projects and gained the trust of his mentor Gordon Buehrig, but also seemed to have trouble working with others, holding down jobs, maintaining relationships, or even staying in one place for too long. His troubles led him to spend part of the early 1940s in a mental institution and drove him to attempt suicide at least twice before killing himself in 1976.

“The history of the car is a lot more nuanced and complicated than the simple claim that Gardner just stole the car and hid it away,” Gustavson said.

Gustavson also calls into question that the Mustang III moniker was applied to the shortened Mustang. While a car on the Ford Custom Car Caravan did appear to go by the Mustang III name, Gustavson said it was applied to a Barris-built car. Though, as Gustavson noted, “these sorts of car name oddities occurred regularly.” This runs counter to the Motor Trend article, which identified the car as the Mustang III.

Snyder, who displayed the car under a Mustang III banner this summer alongside the Mustang I and Mustang II concept and show cars, said that he’s “not certain that (the Mustang III name) is a very important part of its history,” but maintains that Ford commissioned the Mustang. “Vince Gardner couldn’t have bought it because the VIN is a pre-production number,” Snyder said. “It had to have been Ford that did this car. I have the correspondence back and forth between Dearborn Steel Tubing, Ford, and the Inkster Police Department.”

Regardless of its history, the Mustang nowadays sports a full restoration back to its original candy-apple red paint and black interior. The 302 engine and automatic transmission remain original to the car, Snyder said, and though he describes it as a great driver, he doesn’t take it out much because of its uniqueness. “We like to drive our cars, we don’t like to just have them sitting around, which is one reason we’re selling it,” he said.

The Mustang, which will cross the block at the Auctions America event in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been estimated to sell for between $400,000 and $600,000.

The Auctions America Fort Lauderdale sale will take place March 27-29. For more information, visit AuctionsAmerica.com.

UPDATE (15.December 2014): A couple photos of the car under construction at DST that recently surfaced show it with a “Mustang III” license plate. Gustavson said he no longer disputes that another car on the Caravan could have gone by that name.

* Elwood Engel’s Lincoln Mk IX concept, intended to replace the 1961 Lincoln Continental, never made it beyond the mockup stage, but it ended up inspiring many a car throughout the decade, both at Ford and at Chrysler, thanks to Elwood Engel’s hasty departure from the former, or at least so goes Andy Prieboy’s theory, presented this week over at Motorland.

* A group of four Kentuckians have been charged with fraud and conspiracy after three garage fires in 2009 and 2010 destroyed eight different collector cars the group owned and claimed as restored to collect bigger insurance payouts. (via)

* The above car doesn’t look like a Porsche, doesn’t carry a Porsche badge, but was indeed designed by the sports car company as part of an effort to win a government contract to build cars in China. As Ronan Glon at Ran When Parked wrote, Porsche expected to build up to half a million C88s per year, but then the Chinese government suddenly pulled the plug on the project.

In the fall and winter of 1967, Hurst Performance Research took a brand-new 4-4-2 and installed an entire W34 Toronado driveline–front-wheel-drive, torsion bars, the lot. The Toronado’s frame was joined with the 4-4-2′s frame about halfway down the wheelbase. The floor was flattened to eliminate the driveshaft hump, a beam axle on stock 4-4-2 coil-spring-and-trailing-arm suspension resided at the rear, and it wore polished Toronado wheels; it has been freshly restored within the last year by its current owner, Fred Mandrick of Scottsdale, Arizona. We wondered: Was the driving experience really worth all of the re-engineering? Or does it just feel like another A-body?

In order to get proper context for a car known popularly as the Fouranado, we drove two other ’68 Oldsmobiles from Mandrick’s collection: an unrestored 19,000-mile 400-powered 4-4-2 coupe and a fully restored Hurst/Olds. Both were automatics, and both were shod with era-correct bias-ply tires in the factory size. The Hurst/Olds managed to feel both quicker and more relaxed; those extra 55 cubes meant power and torque on reserve. Not that the stock 400-cube 4-4-2 was frenzied, by any means: It was plenty quick as it sat, but you could sense that the 400 had to work harder to do what came easily to the Hurst/Olds. The H/O just deepened its voice an octave and hurtled forth like a freight train, and it shifted harder, too. The Hurst/Olds leaned and understeered more in the turns, but the quicker power steering made it far simpler to correct your line than in the standard 4-4-2, whose Armstrong steering wanted nothing more than to self-correct to the straight-ahead with a great deal of force.

And so, to the Fouranado. Inside is stock Olds A-body everywhere, from the gauges to the seats to the carpet. The flat floor (actually the stock A-body floor with the driveline tunnel sectioned out) is sadly hidden by a console.

Turn the key on the dash. The Fouranado sounds a little higher-strung at idle than a production Hurst/Olds does–then again, this is a 400-hp Toronado mill. Accelerate, and the nose doesn’t seem to want to come up. This is a good thing: With the drive wheels in front, the last thing you need is the nose rising skyward at launch to unweight the tires and go up in smoke. Oh, it’s plenty fast–power-wise, it’s as much a step up from the Hurst/Olds as the H/O is from a standard 4-4-2. But the street cars’ squat on their rear tires allows air to get under the nose, keeping it up in a sort of cowboy rake as you accelerate. The Fouranado resists. (Doubtless the extra weight of the driveline, reproportioning the weight forward compared to a standard A-body, plays a role too). Without the nose rising, there’s less air to get under the front of the car and keep it up as you accelerate; as a result, you feel more hunkered down and planted. But it’s more than that. In a world of transverse-engined, front-drive cars, the power limit has long been understood to be around 300 hp without making a car uncontrollable. But GM has managed to put 500 foot-pounds of torque through that hard-shifting OM-case transaxle with nary a peep out of the front tires. There’s no torque steer at all. The sensation of driving a front-wheel-drive car isn’t just minimized, it’s eliminated.

If anything, the hybrid chassis is overwhelmingly calmer than the stock A-bodies’, making for a more sure-footed ride. With the stock 4-4-2 and the Hurst/Olds, virtually every road irregularity worked its way into the suspension to be heard and felt; you think it’s Oldsmobile smooth until you try the Fouranado, which has a distinctly magic-carpet vibe about the ride. The Toronado’s torsion-bar suspension doesn’t seem to work as hard to absorb road irregularities as a standard unequal-length A-arm suspension does–yet the result is smoother and less intrusive. (Or if it is working that hard, it disguises its actions better.) Whoop-de-doos are taken with confidence; the chassis urges you to take things further.

Steering is quicker, if devoid of road feel, and bias-belted tires that squealed at 25 MPH in regular A-bodies didn’t start yelping for another 20 MPH on the Fouranado. How can this be? Track width can’t be the only answer here, although the Toronado’s driveline has more than two inches on a stock 4-4-2 of the era. The 7.75-15 Goodyear Blue Streaks also help; standard 4-4-2s came with F70-14s and the Hurst/Olds with G70-14s. A little more meat on the ground rarely hurts ride or cornering. Also, consider: The Toronado’s driveline was built for a car that weighed fully half a ton more than the A-body it now resides in. Using less-stressed stock components should make it lean less in turns and accelerate harder out of them.

The Fouranado certainly feels more contemporary, more sure-footed, and more driveable, than a lot of cars that were its contemporaries. Such a beast may resist hooning about–no big stinky burnouts, no hanging-out-the-tail antics–but it makes you want to take long trips without thinking twice. As a road car, this machine is compulsively driveable. GM adopting a set-up like this for its A-bodies could have put it miles and years ahead of the competition; it certainly would have helped front-wheel drive get a better reputation than it currently enjoys.